WHAT could be termed weapons of mass distraction continue to be the favourite ordinance in the arsenals of Bermuda's politicians. Like the military's stun grendades, which produce eardrum-rupturing bangs and blinding magnesium flashes designed to disorient hostage takers, hijackers and the like before they are stormed by assault teams, these manufactured issues and initiatives are intended to produce enough sound and light, enough temporary consternation and panicked headlines, to mask the more substantial matters to hand.

Realistically, the brief of any Bermuda Government is relatively straightforward. The remit provided at a General Election is to facilitate economic and social stability, maintain internal security and supervise the social safety nets expected of any well-to-do community, amenities that now range from public education to job-creating public works projects.

But given an increasingly degraded political environment in which both the energy and the will to co-ordinate these activities is either lacking or entirely absent, one in which deception, fraud and dishonesty have tainted everything from the process of constitutional reform to the balance sheets of the Bermuda Housing Corporation, this insistent emphasis on evasion is perhaps only to be expected.

Take the Caricom vote as a case study.

By opting out of the economic and immigration clauses of the Caribbean Community's covenant, its two key provisions, Bermuda's associate membership in this regional trade bloc is rendered meaningless in practical terms. The Premier said as much in introducing the Caricom debate last Friday; the island will essentially have observer status at a confab of regional non-entities debating what will be non-binding non-issues in the Bermuda context. Given the $100,000 annual membership fee amounts to petty cash, the Caricom initiative could hardly be characterised as a drain on the public exchequer without an issue-hungry Opposition looking overly parsimonious and obstructionist.

Although some serious unintended consequences could stem from Bermuda's associate membership over the long run - perhaps most seriously the prospect of a Caribbean Supreme Court replacing the existing right of appeal to the British Privy Council, one of Bermuda's chief draws as an off-shore business jurisdiction - there are no substantial short-term disadvantages. Equally there are absolutely no tangible advantages to Bermuda subsuming an independent identity it spent the better part of a century crafting into an umbrella organisation of "B" islands that remain indistinguishable from one another to anyone who lives outside the region.

But then the sometimes overwrought Caricom debate was never predicated on the pros and cons of associate membership . It was always intended as a crowd-pleasing gambit, a consolation prize for those left inconsolable at the Progressive Labour Party's decision to shelve Independence, a racial and cultural pre-election call to arms in an island where perhaps a third of the population can trace their roots back to the Caribbean.

The Caricom debate provided the perfect forum for both bulwarking the PLP's now crumbling bona fides as a mass political movement while at the same time allowing for opponents of the initiative to be painted in the most sulphurous tones imaginable as hellish xenophobes and racists (although the fact Government tabled legislation to ban marriages of convenience between Bermudians and illegal immigrants - mostly from the Caribbean - on the same day as the Caricom vote is an irony that seems to have been missed by most everyone, including an increasingly guileless Opposition).

The result was closer to a tub-thumping party political rally than a sober debate, a stage-managed affair that allowed Government to flex atrophied populist muscles through a largely risk-free venture with no immediate impact on Bermuda's ability to act as a free agent in its diplomatic and commercial dealings with North America or Britain or, more importantly, any annoying Caricom red tape that would limit the freedom of action of the island's international corporate and business elites.

The people got super-heated words; the steroid-pumped wedding cakes that pass for office blocks on Reinsurance Row got deeds; the Government will hopefully get re-elected.

While Caricom has conspicuously failed to galvanise Bermudians in isolation, the thinking seems to be that as part of a sustained campaign to mobilise support in the run-up to polling day the debate will eventually pay belated dividends.

CERTAINLY in terms of both shrill tenor and vapid content, the debate was a natural segue from the recent race-baiting hysteria that saw various Cabinet Ministers hurl half-read, entirely undigested copies of the complete works of Frantz Fanon across the floor of the House of Assembly. The strategy is clearly intended to transform latent social and racial hostility into armour plating that will shield the Government against the various scandals of its own making at the next General Election.

It seems, like other beleaguered, scandal-tainted administrations faced with the dolorous prospect of renewing their popular mandates, the leadership of this Government has opted for a co-ordinated pre-election policy of what has been termed triangulation.

Dick Morris, thuggish public relations consigliere to Bill Clinton, refined this balancing act based on the "lesser evil" theory of politics into the near exact science that he called "triangulation" in the early 1990s. The central precept is to keep the leadership in an equidistant position between a core voting constituency on the one hand and the equally important economic and donor constituencies on the other.

In the case of the lyin', philanderin' and non-inhalin' good old boy from Arkansas, this invariably translated into populist posing for the masses and servile pandering to the elites. In the Bermuda context the Premier has seemingly struck a Faustian compact with her own largely disillusioned backbenchers - in return for accepting my leadership, I will deliver unto you the Government benches and the perquisites associated therewith. You can make all the firebrand speeches you want; I will make policy that you hate but which the donors who keep our campaign war-chest full have signed off on. The left is allowed a Parliamentary escape valve for arguments couched in the starkest black and white language (but which must ultimately be colour-coded as purple given the florid, hothouse excesses so beloved of certain backbenchers). The right is given reassurances that these fevered dream racial polemics will never be translated into legislation.

With the leadership presenting itself to the corporate chieftans of Reinsurance Row as a cross between a lion tamer for its own extreme left-wing and a biddable errand boy eager to assist the off-shore sector, the Opposition finds itself painted as the greater of two evils - the UBP cannot control the lunatic left, it is argued - and loses out on the financial largesse of international conglomorates its policies attracted to the island in the first place (the 2000 Census amounts to a sweeping validation of 30 years of UBP business-friendly policies although the Government is already claiming credit for seismic shifts in Bermuda's economic and social tectonics that had started long before the PLP came to power). By pursuing a policy of Bermudianised triangulation, the leadership of this Government has, of course, dead-ended itself in a moral cul-de-sac - quite literally paying lip-service to its founding principles while accepting the financial support of Bermuda-based international companies for not acting on them.

Yet given the pulverising self-regard, the four-year record of sacrificing credibility to political expediency, the inconsistencies and outright hypocisy inherent in this election strategy are hardly likely to cause the Premier to wake up whimpering in the middle of the night.

REMEMBER the Cabinet Office had no moral compunctions about sidling up to a Bermuda-based international businessman in search of a million dollar hand-out, a corporate adventurer with the dubious distinction of being condemned as a war criminal by the African National Congress for literally keeping South Africa's apartheid machine fuelled with oil during the embargo years. The seven-figure contribution was not earmarked for community or charitable purposes but rather to help subsidise the vanity purchase of a $5 million mansion as a mausoleum in which to install the dessicated remains of the Tourism Ministry (the fact a hefty commission would have been paid to the real estate firm that employs the Premier's best friend cum confidante had the deal gone through was presumably, as it says on the title pages of novels, purely coincidental).

If triangulation in the Bill Clinton sense means the eclipsing of truth, standards and accountability for political advantage, clearly Bermuda triangulation results in the complete disappearance of these same qualities.